Then she moves into the shadows. As soon as she does, I try to dash to one side of him, intent on escape.
The horned man seizes hold of my arm. He’s stronger than I expect him to be.
“Lady Suren,” he says.
I growl deep in my throat and catch him with my nails, raking them down his cheek. Mine are nowhere near as long or sharp as Bogdana’s, but he still bleeds.
He makes a hiss of pain but doesn’t let go. Instead, he wrenches my wrists behind my back and holds them tight, no matter how I snarl or kick. Worse, the light hits his face at a different angle and I finally recognize whose skin is under my fingernails.
Prince Oak, heir to Elfhame. Son of the traitorous Grand General and brother to the mortal High Queen. Oak, to whom I was once promised in marriage. Who had once been my friend, although he doesn’t seem to remember it.
What was it the pixie had said about him? Spoiled, irresponsible, and wild. I believe it. Despite his gleaming armor, he is so poorly trained in swordplay that he didn’t even attempt to block my blow.
But after that thought comes another one: I have struck the Prince of Elfhame.
Oh, I am in trouble now.
“Things will be much easier if you do exactly as we tell you from this moment forward, daughter of traitors,” the dark-eyed knight in the leather armor informs me. He has a long nose and the look of someone more comfortable saluting than smiling.
I open my mouth to ask what they want with me, but my voice is rough with disuse. The words come out garbled, the sounds not the ones I intended.
“What’s the matter with her?” he asks, frowning at me as though I am some sort of insect.
“Living wild, I suppose,” says the prince. “Away from people.”
“Didn’t she at least talk to herself?” the knight asks, raising his eyebrows.
I growl again.
Oak brings his fingers to the side of his face and draws them back with a wince. He has three long slashes there, bleeding sluggishly.
When his gaze returns to me, there’s something in his expression that reminds me of his father, Madoc, who was never so happy as when he went to war.
“I told you that nothing good ever came out of the Court of Teeth,” says the knight, shaking his head. Then he takes a rope and ties it around my wrists, looping it through the middle to make it secure. He doesn’t pierce my skin like Lord Jarel used to, leashing me by stabbing a needle threaded with a silver chain between the bones of my arms. I am not yet in pain.
But I do not doubt that I will be.
CHAPTER
2
A
s I trudge through the woods, I think about how I will escape. I have no illusions that I won’t be punished. I struck the prince. And if they knew about the curses I’ve been unraveling, they’d be even more furious.
“Next time you’ll remember not to drop your guard,” the knight says, observing the wounds on Oak’s cheek.
“My vanity took the worst of the blow,” he says.
“Worried about your pretty face?” the knight asks.
“There is too little beauty in the world,” says the prince airily. “But that is not my area of greatest conceit.”
It can’t be coincidence that they turned up clad in armor and pre-pared to fight at nearly the same time Bogdana started poking around my unfamily’s home. They were all looking for me, and whatever the reason, it cannot be one I will like.
I breathe in the familiar scent of wet bark and kicked-up leaf mold. The ferns are silvery in the moonlight, the woods full of shifting shadows.
I wriggle my wrists experimentally. Unfortunately, I am tied well. Flexing my fingers, I try to slip one underneath the binding, but the knots are even too tight for that.
The knight snorts. “Not sure this is the luckiest start to a quest. If the hob hadn’t spotted your little queen here, that hag might be wearing her skin for a coat.”
The owl-faced hob. I grimace, not certain whether I ought to be grateful. I have no idea what they mean to do to me.
“Isn’t that the very definition of luck—to have arrived in time?” Oak throws a mischief-filled glance in my direction, as though at some feral animal he wonders if it would be fun to tame.
I think of him in the High Court, as I was about to be sentenced for my crimes as queen of the traitorous Court of Teeth. I was eleven, and he’d just turned nine. I was bound then, as now. I think of him at thirteen, when he met me in the woods and I sent him away.
At seventeen, he has grown tall, towering over me, lithe and finely muscled. His hair catches the moonlight, warm gold threaded with platinum, bangs parting around small goat horns, eyes of shocking amber, and a constellation of freckles across his nose. He has a trickster’s mouth and the swagger of someone used to people doing what he wanted.
Faerie beauty is different from mortal beauty. It’s elemental, extravagant. There are creatures in Faerie of such surpassing comeliness that they’re painful to look at. Ones that possess a loveliness so great that mortals weep at the sight of them or become transfixed, haunted by the desire to see them even once more. Maybe even die on the spot.
Ugliness in Faerie can be equally extravagant. There are those among the Folk so hideous that all living things shrink back in horror. And yet others have a grotesquerie so exaggerated, so voluptuous, that it comes all the way around to beauty.
It isn’t that mortals can’t be pretty—many of them are—but their beauty doesn’t make you feel pummeled by it. I feel a little pummeled by Oak’s beauty.
If I look at him too long, I want to take a bite out of him.
I turn my gaze to my muddy feet, scratched and sore, then Oak’s hooves. I recall from a stolen school science book that hooves are made from the same stuff that makes up fingernails. Keratin. Above them, a dusting of fur the same color as his hair disappears into a pant cuff hitting just below his knees, revealing the odd curve of his lower legs. Slim-fitting trousers cover his thighs.
I shiver with the force of keeping myself from thrashing against my bindings.
“Are you cold?” he asks, offering his cloak. It’s embroidered velvet, with a pattern of acorns, leaves, and branches. It’s beautifully stitched and looks wildly out of place this far from Elfhame.
This is a pantomime I am familiar with. The performance of gallantry while keeping me in restraints, as though the chill in the air is what I am most worried about. But I suppose this is how princes are expected to behave. Noblesse oblige and all that.
Since my hands are tied, I am not sure how he expects me to put it on. When I say nothing, he drapes it over my shoulders, then ties it at my throat. I let him, even though I am used to the cold. Better to have something than not, and it’s soft.
Also, it hangs over my hands, shielding them from view. Which means that if I do manage to get my wrists loose from the knots, no one will know until it’s too late.
That’s twice he’s been foolish.
I try to concentrate on escape and on not allowing hopelessness to sweep over me. Were my hands free, I would still need to get away. But if I did, I think I could prevent them from tracking me. The knight may have been taught how to follow a trail, but I have had years of experience obscuring mine.
Oak’s skills—if he has any outside of being a lordling—are unknown to me. It’s possible that despite all his big talk and his pedigree, the prince has brought the knight along to make sure he doesn’t trip and impale himself on his own fancy sword.